Schnitzler, Emil Schult, Memphis Schulze, Katharina Sieverding, Ilona & Wolfgang Weber. With these protagonists, we
take a fresh look at how the arts began to set out along more
differentiated paths in the post-war years, and at sproutings of
subculture in German-speaking countries and around Europe; most of the
works on display in Singular / Plural have never before been shown at an
exhibition. A pivotal factor is that this loose-knit group of
cosmopolitans developed their predilections and strategies as they
responded to and distanced themselves from vestiges of German fascism.
They were interested in post-painting painting, in music, photography,
slide projections, film and intermedia, performances, everyday life, the
rites of the Rhineland, comics, pop culture, rockabilly, hippies and
rockers, punk and new wave. We have defined this constellation as the
post-pop-polit arena. It is about attitudes to politics and about
reordering the myths of what is popular, about appropriating, repeating,
sampling, reinterpreting, copying and faking visual material outside
the mainstream. Apart from seeking to escape the Cold War order while
caught within the narrow confines of the West, and before the art system
went global, the artists exhibited here raised important questions
about the function of images in the emerging fun-driven information
society.

Singular / Plural is a themed group show structured
around issues like collaborations, colonial histories, music, comics,
economies and gender. The works – and the documentary material, printed
matter, vinyl and other related items – are not presented in
chronological sequence, but follow the same labyrinthian patterns as the

process-based collaborations and debates in which these artists
engaged. The art demonstrates a sense of political mission and
self-irony; it resonates with contemporary interests. Christof Kohlhöfer
and Emil Schult drew psychedelic comic strips, Bruno Demattio and
Stephan Runge probed into individual mythologies and

counter-cultures,
Memphis Schulze, Achim Duchow and Sigmar Polke pre-empted a street art
craze by taking up the spray can. Lutz Mommartz and Astrid Heibach
raised questions about former German colonies when such curiosity was
still rare in German-speaking countries, and Michael Deistler travelled
to Egypt in the footsteps of the Nazis’ military campaign in Africa.
Meanwhile, Candida Höfer cast an ethnographic eye over society back
home, and Ingrid Kohlhöfer interrogated clichéd views of freaks.Tony
Morgan, Ulrike Rosenbach and Katharina Sieverding explored
gender-critical perspectives and rock poses in pop culture, and Conrad
Schnitzler transformed the Pop Art heritage with new forms of electronic
music. Many of the multimedia works have been reconstructed for this
exhibition, making them accessible again for the first time. Achim
Duchow, for example, composed sound for slide projections that addressed
the role of the Red Army Faction, the gutter press and the art market
during the “red decade”. Key to the curatorial concept is that group
members experimented with unorthodox lifestyles and at the same time
suspended singular authorship. Like Klaus vom Bruch, Ilona and Wolfgang
Weber produced portraits of the Düsseldorfer Gruppe in the form of slide
shows and collections of photographs, whereas others swapped their
material or, like Sigmar Polke with Memphis Schulze or Achim Duchow with
Angelika Oehms, created

joint works. As philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy
phrased it, “being-with” – or, in other words, being a “singular plural”
– always assumes engaging in exchange with others, and that begs the
question: how can groups evolving within specific art projects function
as a plurality without the “we” lapsing into a totality.

Within
the Düsseldorf milieu, these processes of exchange, transformation and
discussion were maintained within public fora; the Kunsthalle operated
as a central stage for their activities. The artists on show in Singular
/ Plural played an active part in setting the historical agenda for
this institution with, for example, the alternative

cycles between and
Prospekt, while the major exhibitions were usually reserved for the
pre-war generation. The presentation of this anniversary show therefore
makes crucial references to three historical exhibitions: Yes Sir,
That’s My Baby, which was part of the between cycle in 1973, the Sigmar
Polke retrospective Bilder, Tücher, Objekte in 1976, which was actually a
group exhibition in the form of a total installation, and
Nachbarschaft, also held in 1976.